On August 4, 1983, a thirty-three-year-old army officer called Thomas Sankara seized power in Upper Volta, which he soon renamed Burkina Faso. At the head of what one historian labeled an “unstable coalition of small political groups and military factions,” he immediately embarked on a far-reaching political turn aimed at securing true economic and democratic sovereignty for the West African country.

Over the next four years, the revolution led by Sankara advanced a project of social transformation, seeking to shake off the legacy of French colonial domination. His government adopted a series of key economic measures in this vein, from breaking up the privileges of the state bureaucracy to agrarian reform and the quest for self-sufficiency in food and manufacturing. The revolution also meant the promotion of women’s rights — with professional training and the fight against genital mutilation and polygamy — as well as vast vaccination and literacy campaigns, environmental protection measures, and support for national liberation movements abroad.

Yet this revolution was also met with opposition from powerful groups in Burkinabé society, from public officials now subject to a militarized discipline to traditional chiefs stripped of their customary authority. Sankara’s changes troubled not only the most privileged categories — notably including parts of the military and business elites — but also established trade unions whose role was challenged by workplace Revolutionary Defense Committees, and both pro-Soviet and social-democratic oppositional forces.